Faire cuts onboarding time by 33% and raises the quality bar across its entire CX operation

Industry

B2B Marketplace (Wholesale Retail)

Customer

Aaron MacDonald

Director, Global Operations Enablement & Vendor Operations

User since

Mar 2026

Faire is a wholesale marketplace connecting independent retailers and brands across the globe. Its CX team supports a diverse base of small businesses, from mom-and-pop shops to boutique brands, for whom every interaction matters.

As Faire scaled and its product roadmap accelerated, the CX enablement team faced a dual challenge: getting agents up to speed faster without compromising quality, and building a quality function that could keep pace with thousands of weekly tickets. Traditional training and manual quality review left too many gaps. Faire turned to Solidroad to close them, using simulations to drive both speed to proficiency and verified comprehension, and rethinking how quality is measured across new and existing support agents.

The challenge

Quality and speed were at odds with each other.

Faire's CX enablement team operates across three pillars: learning and development, customer advocacy, and vendor operations. In any given half-year, the team supports over 100 customer-facing launches, ranging from new product features to policy changes that carry real financial and legal implications if handled incorrectly.

Before Solidroad, launching a tier-one training meant pulling agents out of the support queue for instructor-led sessions. Knowledge checks (typically multiple-choice quizzes or written responses graded by the enablement team) could test whether an agent understood the material. They couldn't test whether that agent was ready to handle a live, back-and-forth conversation about it.

The result: a persistent gap between what leadership could see and what was actually happening on the front lines.

"There was a big leap from agents digesting new information to actually applying it. That's where Solidroad has been really helpful."

Aaron MacDonald

Director, Global Operations Enablement & Vendor Operations

WHY SOLIDROAD?

Support-specific. Not a sales tool in disguise.

Aaron had known for over a year that simulation-based practice was the missing piece. What held him back was the market. Most tools he encountered were built for sales teams, focused on closing techniques and upsell moments, not on root-cause resolution, SOP adherence, or region-specific policy nuance.

Faire's customer base made that distinction critical. An independent retailer in Germany and one in the United States might ask the identical question and require completely different answers based on local regulations and program availability. A tool built for sales couldn't evaluate against that kind of complexity.

Solidroad surfaced as part of a broader evaluation of QA tooling, and it was the simulation capability that made the decision. For Aaron's team, the platform's support focus meant scorecards that checked not just conversational tone, but whether the agent actually diagnosed the right problem and applied the right solution. That depth was the differentiator.

SOLUTION

Practice as the proof of understanding.

Faire piloted Solidroad with a new hire cohort focused on phone support — one of the highest-stakes modalities in their operation. Rather than mock role-plays with colleagues or passive e-learns, agents practiced against realistic AI-simulated customer conversations, including difficult ones built from actual tickets and real customer scenarios.

The results landed quickly. Faire reduced new hire onboarding from 12 weeks to 8 weeks (a 33% reduction in time to ramp) without a drop in quality scores. The pilot cohort, despite four fewer weeks of onboarding, went on to match or outperform peers who had been through longer programs.

On the quality measurement side, the shift was equally significant. Rather than relying on knowledge checks to approximate comprehension, Faire moved toward simulation-based assessment as the primary evaluation mechanism. The goal: replace multiple-choice quizzes with bundles of graded simulations tied directly to what agents had just learned. If you can handle the scenario, you're ready. If you can't, you know exactly where the gap is.

"With Solidroad’s simulations, we are able to stagger the number of people coming out of the queue for trainings at any given time. It protects our support structure, while still giving everyone the hands-on practice they needed."

Aaron MacDonald

Director, Global Operations Enablement & Vendor Operations

RESULT

Faster ramp, stronger quality, and speed for the entire organization.

Since deploying Solidroad, Faire has seen measurable gains across both dimensions they set out to improve:

33% reduction in onboarding time — from 12 weeks to 8 weeks for new hire cohorts, with quality scores maintained
Improved agent confidence — with direct feedback from agents that simulation practice made live interactions feel less intimidating and more manageable
Stronger continuous learning coverage — rolling out simulations to tenured agents for complex issue types and frustrated-customer scenarios, informed by weekly CSAT trends and agent self-reported confidence gaps
50% faster enablement turnaround — what previously required one to three weeks of slide decks, e-learns, and instructor-led sessions can now be built and deployed in a matter of days, cutting development time in half at minimum

The team is also evolving how they measure quality more broadly. Aaron's view: CSAT tells you a general trend, but it's an inherently limited signal — capturing mostly the extremes, missing process failures that customers didn't flag, and surfacing nothing about the qualitative content of the interaction itself. Building toward richer, conversation-level quality insight — what agents said, whether they followed the right process, how they handled a policy no — is the next frontier Faire is working toward with Solidroad embedded in the workflow.

CONCLUSION

Quality that scales with the product roadmap.

For a company shipping 100+ customer-facing launches per half-year, the speed at which enablement can turn around training matters as much as the training itself. Solidroad has given Faire's team a path to move at product speed — not by cutting corners on quality, but by replacing the slowest, least predictive parts of the training process with something that actually measures readiness.

As the virtual assistant at Faire continues to deflect more routine questions, the conversations that reach human agents will keep getting harder. The team that's been practicing the hard ones is already ahead of where they need to be.